In conventional technologies, people with sight disabilities would like to read newspapers, books, and so on. One of the problems with the presentation of text in these mediums is that there can be a fair amount of background clutter. For instance, a watermark (the Wells Fargo® coach, for instance) can interfere with someone's ability to read the check on which the watermark appears if the person has a vision impairment. To compensate for this problem, several conventional approaches have been tried.
One conventional approach involves character recognition. In this approach, software looks at a pixilated photograph and tries to recognize certain letters of the alphabet, and these are output to the end user as an enhanced text field. However, there are problems with this approach. For instance, OCR has problems dealing with text of differing formats and sizes, backgrounds can interfere with OCR, and the process generally requires very high quality, high resolution images, such as produced by a document scanner.
Another approach is to use simple magnification on the image (either analog or pixilated), where each picture element of the image is displayed larger than life size. While this can help with some visual impairments, with others it does not provide much benefit. Additionally, there are problems with simply magnifying images with no image processing. When magnifying pixilated images the large pixel elements start to become visible, making the image blocky and harder to read. The background noise and clutter is also magnified, and often can become even more of a distraction than in the unmagnified image.
A third conventional approach, often used with the magnification approaches described above, is to try to adjust the contrast in a picture. This can be very good for situations wherein the background is uniform and hard to differentiate from the letters. However, non-uniform backgrounds, either due to non-uniformity in the printed matter itself, or due to variations introduced during the imaging process, for example, by non-uniform lighting, can receive the same kinds of contrast enhancements as the type-face, thereby making the characters difficult or impossible to read.
Therefore, there is a need for a system to aid in the reading of documents in a manner that addresses at least some of the deficiencies of conventional text reading systems.